Th e Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’s My Diary in a Chinese Farm 149
rural spaces as a home which creates an infl uential set of harmonious images. It
is depicted as a settled landscape mapping out a social order across a picturesque
terrain, especially in its construction as ‘village England’.^19 So if we are to look
for the rural idyll which is projected into imaginings and ideologies, we have to
track it into a national identity that shores up what it means to be English. Here,
the implication is that the white landscape of rurality is aligned with nativeness,
the absence of evil and danger, and is protected against alien invasions.
In the nineteenth century, relating rurality to racial purity was a method of
interpreting the new and emerging social relations infl uenced by colonialism and
reinforced by the urban–rural dichotomy.^20 Scholars describe European coloni-
alism as a form of cultural mobility that travels from a metropolitan centre to
a colonial periphery. Nineteenth-century European travellers to the colonial
periphery oft en wrote about the inequities of imperial power and stressed the dif-
ferences between their experiences and the suppositions of the imperial centre, in
order to proclaim the cultural rehabilitation of the periphery.^21 Little is an exam-
ple of such a traveller who not only describes the Chinese as a defi led group but
also presents a boundary of hybridization in which self and other are involved in
an inclusive and heterogeneous unstable zone. Th is links the ideas of rurality, eth-
nicity and ethnic purity. Sibley discusses the problem of the rural idyll and refers
to it as the product of moral ordering and purifi cation.^22 Sibley maps a social space
according to which some groups or people are deemed to be excluded. Minorities
are portrayed as defi led and are positioned in particular social categories which
defi ne the boundaries of society. To frame this geography, the imagery character-
izes both people and place, refl ecting people’s need to distance themselves from
defi led people and defi led places.^23 If rurality infers racial purity, the idyll-distur-
bance prompts the need for exclusion to keep the rural pure:
[Th e rural] is a place where gender and ethnic identities can be anchored in ‘tra-
ditional’ ways, far ... from the fragmented, ‘mix up’ city. Within the rural domain
identities are fi xed, making it a white, English, family-oriented, middle-class space ...
[T]he rural is extolled for the virtues of peace and quiet, of community and neigh-
bourliness, virtues deemed to be absent from the urban realm.^24Th e nineteenth century reshaped the rural as a place of purity and so designed
to exclude minorities identifi ed as having the potential to pollute that space. Th e
separation is projected into society and produces an ordered social spatialization
of margin and centre.^25
On a global scale, rural space may be used imaginatively when discussing the
geographical variations of the term ‘rural’ internationally.^26 David Bell poses ques-
tions about the possibilities of circulating the notion of the rural idyll globally.
Most works on the rural examine rurality within the boundary of a region, but
cultural constructions of idyllic ruralities also circulate across borders and geo-